Learning another language usually involves moments when you
encounter other people speaking that language.
I live and work in an environment where I hear multiple languages every
day (one of my two university departments has upwards of 75 nationalities in its
undergraduate community), but I’m yet to overhear a Yiddish conversation on the
bus to campus or in the coffee queue. Part of this is geographical context – I’m
reliably informed that in certain areas of Montreal you can overhear Hassidic
kids talking about their radio controlled cars in Yiddish, but in the Midlands
that’s less than likely. In fact, the only time I’ve heard Yiddish spoken in
the street is when I’m already involved in the conversation. The upside of this
situation is that I get to indulge my linguistic path-finding fantasies by using
Yiddish in locations where it might never have been heard before. I’m not sure
if it’s cultural pride or just straight up contrariness that means I’ve
learnt Yiddish grammar on a beach in Suffolk, shouted Yiddish threats on the
East Sussex marshes and written Yiddish greetings in the sand of North Norfolk,
but it’s great fun either way.
What this lack of casually overheard Yiddish means is that I’m
hyper-alert to those moments when it turns up in films and on television. As
previously discussed, the internet means that I can go online and find the most
wonderful examples of spoken Yiddish, but it’s these chance encounters that I
really love. Even before I started learning Yiddish properly, every time a
Yiddish word showed up on screen it made me happy. Historically, the huge
majority of these random snippets were jokes and insults, which I usually
understood but which expanded my vocabulary nonetheless. A special shout-out
here to The Goonies (both Yiddish and Hebrew there, thanks to the
inimitable Chunk) and The Simpsons,
which has done more for the cause of sharing Yiddish than any other show I
know.
Now that my Yiddish has improved I can recognize it even in
the most unexpected places, like, for example, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when an overly appreciative Marvin Acme
tells Jessica Rabbit that she “farshmaysned” (slaughtered) her adoring audience.
This example gets extra points for the wonderfully cavalier mash-up of a Yiddish
verb (farshmaysn) with English verb ending (-ed); Yiddish is great for this
kind of multi-lingual grammatical construction. After all, what’s the point of a diasporic
language if you can’t combine a Hebrew word with a Slavic prefix and then
pluralize it according to Germanic grammar? But my absolute favourite
unexpected Yiddish moment comes in Robert Hamer’s beautifully bleak post-war
noir The Long Memory (1953), when
John Slater calls Fred Johnson ”You shiker old shnorer” (that is, “You drunken
old beggar”). What’s most amusing about this example is that the subtitles on
the DVD don’t even try to work out the Yiddish, instead rather imaginatively transforming
Slater’s line into “You old slurry”. That does have a certain estuarine suitability,
what with the scene taking place on a Thames riverboat, but someone, somewhere,
really dropped the ball on that one.
Of course, the problem with these examples is that they’re
nowhere near conversational Yiddish, which is completely understandable but
still disappointing for an obsessive like myself. There are some contemporary Yiddish
treasures out there, but you do need to look for them. The opening scene of the
Cohen brothers’ A Serious Man is a
very good effort, introducing me as it did to the concept of a דיבוק (dybbuk) courtesy of the
legendary and much lamented Fyvush Finkel. If all dybbuks were this adorable, who’d be scared of them?
And yet despite its atmospheric heft, this scene doesn’t really represent
conversational Yiddish, at least, not as my family would have spoken it.
There’s nothing wrong with the grammar or anything technical like that, it’s
more that the language feels a little stagey, as though the characters are
talking in proverbs. In fact, once this scene is over there’s no other Yiddish
in the film, so it tends to perpetuate the misconception that Yiddish is simply
part of that lost other world of European Jewry. That’s not the Yiddish I know,
which is resolutely here and now rather than still languishing in some freezing
shtetl, but it has been surprisingly difficult to find modern, conversational
Yiddish represented in popular culture.
This is why we should all be thankful for the existence of Yidlife Crisis AKA Jamie Elman and Eli
Batalion, two absolute reprobates and unrepentant gannets who have managed to
capture Yiddish in all its filthy, food-centric glory. Discovering their web
series was cause for much rejoicing, not least because at last I could hear
Yiddish being spoken like any other living language, full of word-play and
silliness as well as some Grade-A swearing.
These guys learnt Yiddish at High School in Montreal (there’s
a pattern developing here) so have something of a linguistic head-start, but
listening to them rip on each other and the world at large in the language I
love most is an emesdike mekhaye (true delight). The only problem is, whenever
I watch an episode I end up ravenously hungry. Damn, those guys can eat. But in
the absence of Yiddish that I can overhear in the street, this is enough to remind me
that the mame-loshn is alive and well, if a little overly obsessed with poutine.
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